They Leave In The Night COMPLETED
by atthebottomofthepond
Summary: Sherlock is at Molly's door at 2AM. He's not alone.


My tutor told me once, just before my finals, that people were wrong about us. They thought that to do this job you needed to be hard and detached, you needed to at ease with death, to embrace and accept it. But the best forensic pathologists, he said, needed to be gentle and empathetic, they needed to fight against the finality of death, the finality that there were no answers and that death was simply something that happened to everyone. You need to be at war with death, not at peace with it, you need to fight it for answers, and you need to make it talk.

So I went off, fighting an endless war with death, and I cared about the body in front of me, I wanted to know its killer and I think, maybe, that was why I was drawn to Sherlock. It's not that I didn't find him attractive, because it would be a lie to say I didn't, but it was more than that, more than his coat, more than his cheekbones, it was his fire and passion. It was how it moulded onto my own. He, too, was at war with death, and we sought the same answers. I envied him. In a way, we were so different, he could read a body in a way that I couldn't, and he could understand patterns that had taken me hours to work out in a second. He was quicker, sharper, and cleverer. Unlike me, he had learnt to be hard around death, fierce, but fundamentally, we wanted the same thing. To know how and why a body was lying in front of us.

It's 2AM when I hear a crash at my door. Thinking the worst, I grab the baseball bat from the side of my bed. The floor is freezing but I'm scared to put the light on so I walk, icy step by icy step, to the frozen glass window flooded by orange streetlamp light. I know it's Sherlock before I reach it, and I let the bat drop from my hand and run the last few steps. Sherlock should not be at my front door in the early hours of the morning. Something must be wrong. I open the door and he falls through, I notice a bundled blanket in his shaking arms and for a second, I think he's done something truly awful.

_'Sherlock, what's wrong, it's two in the fucking morning! Are you hurt!?'_

_'No, I'm not but…'_

_'Just tell me, what have you done? Are you in trouble?'_

_'Okay, but I came to you for two reasons, and the first one was is that I trust you'_

_'Okay Sherlock, just tell me…'_

_'You have to promise not to tell anyone! Not anyone at all! Not even John okay. Especially not John!'_

_'Okay, I promise, please just tell me what's happened'_

He places to bundled blankets softly in my arms and I feel a weight that I vaguely recognise but can't remember. I place my hand into the middle of the mass and feel cold skin, cold skin covered in blood. I am shaking so much Sherlock reaches out to steady my arms. I am terrified now, I am sure it is some horrifying evidence of a crime, and a part of me is paralyzed by the fear that it make be the result of Sherlock's doing.

_'Look, Molly…'_

He peels away a corner of cloth and reveals the wrinkled, tiny head of a baby. He or she looks only hours old. There is blood around the corners and in the creases of his face and he/she isn't crying. Immediately, I check for a pulse, a breath and a part of me, the part beneath the left hand side of my ribcage, swells. The baby is alive.

_I'm sorry Molly, I didn't know what else to do.'_

I'm not listening to Sherlock anymore, I'm listening to the tiny heartbeats I'm cradling in my arms, staring transfixed at the tiny breathes rising and falling in a soft rhythm. I am overwhelmed with the need to protect this creature I have only just met, this tiny human life that is now in my hands.

I tried to level out my breathing to match the babies; I tried to keep us in sync as Sherlock started to tell me how this tiny miracle had journeyed into my arms, into our arms. I could not understand anything about Sherlock's compulsion to become involved in this story. Once again, I am scared, I am scared for what I'm about to hear.

'It was raining', he began, 'I was walking home from the tube and I saw a girl, of about nineteen, crippled over, learning hard against the wall.' As he spoke his eyes were shining bright, there was something almost dangerous about their stare, about their movements, about their vitality, something I had never seen their before. 'She was crying, sobbing uncontrollably and everyone was just walking past her as if they couldn't see, as if they couldn't hear. I have always been confused by the actions of others, but these have been largely down to my own failings, this time I was so sure I was in the right, that I was the one about to act in the way all of these other people should act, was going to be the one to stop, to go over, to ask…' I can't believe what I'm hearing. I can't believe these words that are falling freely from his mouth, as if they had been buried for years and only just realised that they were allowed to leave.'

'I walked over to her and I could see her limbs shaking through her clothes. She looked like a ghost and you could tell she thought she was one. She thought she didn't exist, there, on that street, against that wall, in front of me. She was trying to hide in plain sight and if it wasn't for me, she would have been successful. I felt so guilty, as if I was intruding (I was intruding) and for a second a part of me wanted to turn around, to walk by, I can't explain what stopped me, I don't understand it. It was something new, something different, and something that had, until now, been alien to me.'

My breaths are no longer mimicking the babies; I am fighting hard with myself, with my lungs, to not make a sound. I fear that any sound from me may break this spell. That a single, faint gasp will dissolve this scene. There will be no baby in my arms, there will be no Sherlock still shaking at my feet. One wrong move, one wrong sound, and this is all over.

'She didn't look up, so I gentled touched her shivering shoulder. Started, she starred through the tears, through the glass window between us. I didn't know what to do with my face, with my features; I didn't know where to put my mouth or how to open my eyes. I just starred as she lifted her head up and looked straight into my eyes.'

'What's wrong with you?' I asked, and she told me. She told me every single detail. Every secret she had locked in her head became my secret too. She begged me not to say anything, so I didn't. I just helped her onto the cold, chewing gum stained pavement and sat next to her, stroking her hand.

'She opened the zip of her coat and I saw the blood. I thought she'd been stabbed but then I saw him.. or her… or whatever it was… a baby, wrapped in the white of her shirt. It wasn't moving or crying and I panicked, I thought it was dead, I thought maybe she'd killed it, I had no idea how much blood you lost through labour, I had never thought about it, I had never needed to think about it, but then I touched it, felt it's warmth, it's live, it's breathe, and I knew that it was okay. He started to cry and, If anything, I panicked more than, in many ways a dead baby is easier to deal with than a living one and I was confused, I couldn't understand why she was so upset if her baby was okay, aren't mothers meant to be radiant, overjoyed, in absolute love with their child? But she wasn't. She was hysterical and distressed and wouldn't stop crying.'

I am picturing the scene but it's incomplete, there is something missing, a piece is absent… Try as I might, I just can't imagine Sherlock being there; I can't imagine him touching the head of a newborn baby, I can't imagine him stroking the hand of a crying woman, comforting or holding her. Again, I notice my breathing, and I try to keep it even. The thing is, the more you focus on how you're breathing, the more you panic and think you're going to stop. It's a classic symptom of anxiety, the fear that you may forget how to breath properly. I am trying to calm it, contain it, I wonder what I'm going to hear next, I am wondering how this baby came to me, through Sherlock. I wonder what he wants from me; the baby was clearly okay so he hadn't come to me for medical help and something inside me told me that this wasn't about what I did for a living, this wasn't about my profession, this was about me and about him, and something indescribable was happening between us. Something was breaking down, or being built. Something was changing.

'She told me that it was too late, that she'd found out she was pregnant when it was too late to do anything about it, she didn't want another life growing inside her, her own life was a mess and she couldn't bear the thought of bringing a baby into it, she wasn't even sure it was the baby she wanted to get rid of, a part of her felt diseased, dead, maybe it wasn't the baby that was the problem, maybe it was here… She was hoping she'd die in childbirth, that's why she'd chosen to have the baby on the street, she knew London was unkind, she knew that people wouldn't stop, or even notice, a sobbing heap on the pavement, but she knew that someone would take the child and care for it, she the baby would be safe.'

'I looked at her hand, still clasped in mine, her pulse was erratic and her skin was clammy. I knew she had done something else, something else to make sure she would die out here. She said she was scared she wouldn't die from the blood loss, so she'd been taking regular overdoses of Asprin to stop prevent her blood from clotting. That explained all the blood…'

Sherlock looked away from me and sighed, I can see the judgements in his head form, or at least I think they are judgments, about unprotected sex, or casual sex, or of people not being able to control themselves. I could imagine him being angry at her for trying to take her own life, and for inadvertently dragging him into this drama, a part of me is praying that he wasn't cruel to this girl, that he hadn't taken the baby away from her out of cruel judgements about her ability to be a mother, but as he turns back to me, I see the sadness in his eyes and I know that he was thinking all of those things and yet they didn't matter, they were overpowered by humanity, a humanity I never imagined him to possess.

I'm dreading the rest of the story. I don't think I wanted to hear it. I don't want to hear Sherlock say he held her hand as she was dying, and placed ferryman coins on her eyes after he closed them. The truth is, I was scared. I was scared of this hidden side of him. I was scared of his words, I knew that at some point he'd explain why he'd come to me in the middle of the night, not just how he had got here.

I do something cruel. I do something that goes against the grain of me. I am not a cruel person. I am soft and gentle, like I was taught to be, yet in this moment I am unkind;

I kiss him.

I kiss him to stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth. I kiss him to stop the river of his sadness escaping into the mouth of the sea. I swallow them for him, letter by letter, but I am not doing it for him, I am not doing it to save him. I'm saving myself.

He came to me because he trusted me, because he wanted to share this with me, these words that are now a weight he can't share with me. I refuse to help him with the load.

When he kisses me back and that feeling I had when I felt the babies pulse floods me, overwhelms me, I realise now that it is love, not passion or lust or attraction, but love. I understand why he has come here tonight, why he held the hand of this bleeding, dying woman. Why he didn't judge her, or force her into the back of an ambulance. I understand why he took her baby and bought him to me. His eyes are closed as we kiss and I can feel the fit of my mouth against his. I can trace my fingers across the edges of us, as if neither of us have edges of our own, edges that end.

As we pull apart, I look down into the sleeping eyes of my future, of our future.


End file.
